by Junts on 10 Mar 2010, 04:35
I've been thinking about battle flow problems recently having read the last few turns worth of wars. I consequently have two separate suggestions. The first is fairly radical and I suppose its unlikely to institute such a significant change in this edition. The second is smaller.
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Morale and Food
Food management has only rarely been a major concern on SimRTK. For a long time, battles long enough for food to be an issue were quite rare, and battles that went more than 10 turns were exceptionally uncommon. Battles were usually won via withdrawal or via capitalizing on the various instant-win conditions that have been removed from the battle system over time (capture of a hq in a city, defeat of a commander in chief, for example, both used to instantly rout the opposing force).
However, the removal of these two instant victory conditions simply turned them into 2 turn victory conditions, as these units are by far most likely to be the ones that control food supply, and running out of food pretty much guarantees that you will lose the battle. The penalties for having no food have not changed at all over time, and they are incredibly severe (as they should be!). However, the consequence works out to being that, unless your own food is about to fall in a single turn as well, you lose the battle.
This is just the latest in the series of easy victory conditions, and while its a little less easy (because it takes 2 or 3 turns) than the old ones, its still easy and guaranteed victory. I think most people would agree that having food be a major logistical issue is an improvement, but I think it's one we can improve further. In addition, I think in doing so we can add another real battle tactics issue to SimRTK: real supply lines.
Consequently, I come to the following suggestion:
No longer will one unit manage food for an entire army, or one location control it all (be that the cic, headquarters of the city, etc). Instead, every unit will be capable of carrying its own food supply, but only up to a limit of 30 days worth of food. A unit that runs out of food will have its morale decay separately from its own force (and quickly rout with the assocated penalties to everyone else). However, this will not add a major logistical concern for battle runners, because nothing else will control morale on an individual unit level: a GM will only have to account for unique unit morale when a unit has run out of food.
How, then, will extended battles take place? These are becoming increasingly common, and its good that they have. This, too, is simple.
In Cities: As now, the headquarters will control excess food. In order to resupply, units must be within the city. Units that are outside the city must be re-supplied manually. However, they will automatically re-supply as long as they are within the city itself.
Similarly with gates and forts, units in close proximity to their gates and forts can re-supply from those locations. Similarly, these locations should recieve a headquarters building that can be captured with the associated penalties (the HQ will appear when a fortification is built or exists .. open battlefields lack one unless a fort is constructed. Simple).
What about attackers? Or defenders who persue a counter-attack outside their cities or away from their forts or gates?
They must resupply by moving into proximity with another unit with food. This can be made to take a battle action or it can be automatic (I would lean to automatic). And then we get to the fun:
Logistics:
Logistics does the following:
A unit with logistics on the headquarters extends the auto-supply range for the army by 4-6 hexes. A unit with logistics may carry more than 30 days worth of food at once. A unit with logistics may re-supply another unit from 2 hexes away.
This makes logistics a more active process and food supply something that gets into tactics - intercepting another unit to prevent food resupply, etc, is a valid tactic in an extended battle, and so is destroying an enemy unit to take their food. This makes food situations more fluid on both sides instead of simply an inevitable, ticking clock of doom. Considering the cost of the skill right now, I don't believe adding all these features to what it does now would make it overpowered. I would, however, adjust it to only affect your own unit in terms of lower food consumption, instead of force-wide, even for commanders. Since commanders won't control the whole food supply anymore, this is only logical.
However, this relates to something important that needs to be changed, anyway:
Reinforcing extended battles on a KT invasion needs to not have the 2-turn arrival delay. Its nonsensical that the first invasion to a city takes no time waste, but a second invasion launched the next turn to reinforce will arrive 2 turns later, and consequently the first battle actually goes 12 turns before the arrival of reinforcements. This is a problem for the food situation, but its also a problem that punishes layered troop reinforcement in a silly way. Either it takes 2 turns to arrive in siege, or it doesn't, and it should be consistent between the first invasion and subsequent forces being sent into the battle.
This should produce a more realistic and controllable food situation that is much more strategically and tactically demanding, without being outright, brutally punishing. The main addition of work for battle-runners will be doing the food math extra times per turn, but that's always been pretty much instant math anyway.
edit: Oh, and for fun, lets make any attack that causes a fire in the square of a unit destroy some of its food as well. If I see you're near starving, maybe I'll want to fire attack your hex to speed it up by a turn, especially since damaging you will lower your food consumption (by making you have less units). The amount of food lost per fire per turn should be pretty low, though, and only apply if the hex is actually on fire, not simply a fire-based attack that fails to ignite the hex (eg missile).
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Ad Hoc Duels.
Ad hoc duels are great. They're realistic, they reward having a decent to solid war statistic. However, they have two flaws:
1: they are draws around 90% of the time
> A: Unless there is an injury (see Deng Ai), the draws are completely non-decisive
2: they cause significant battle delay for tactics
3: when they result in neither an injury or a victor, they are basically nothing but wasted time.
Extending them so that one general always lost would be problematic: it would make for a too-easy way to destroy an enemy unit by capturing its commander in an ad-hoc duel instead of fighting it. So that's not the solution. Instead, lets use this simple result:
The person with more hit points remaining (or who didn't flee) is the person who wins the duel, even if neither is defeated. This is the person who retired from the battle first, automatically. Consequently, the penalties for battle-duel loss (the small morale adjustments) apply.
In this fashion, ad-hoc duels will always make a difference, unless in the very rare situation that people end duels with the same hit points. This could even be extended to draws when people end within 2-3 hit points of each other, so that duels are a little more possible. However, it makes the majority of them impact the battle in some fashion and creates an incentive to do something in them besides spam potential wound-causing attacks that will actually harm the enemy general for the rest of the battle.
Its problematic that something that adds an extra 12-24 hours to a battle post for tactic submissions is so rarely decisive. Its great when they are (like Deng Ai's injury right now) but it's a bit too uncommon. The ad-hoc duels are not so common (they don't even happen once a battle) and they should do something .. at all .. when they pop up.
The extraordinarily ancient Liu Cao of ages past.
<Elysia> I am the simRTK MILF
